Episode 32: Inside the Investigation

The Supreme Court heard arguments in March 2014 about whether the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 allows a for-profit corporation to deny its employees the health coverage of contraceptives to which the employees are otherwise entitled by federal law, based on the religious objections of the corporation's owners.

Sometimes the journey is as interesting as the destination.

That’s what our colleague at Scripps News, investigative reporter Mark Greenblatt, discovered as he pursued what he thought was a straightforward news story. Greenblatt got a tip: NASA was spending a boatload of money on first-class and business-class airfares.

That set Greenblatt off on a quest worthy of Camelot, through mazes of bureaucracy, mountains of Freedom of Information requests and dungeons of unreturned phone calls. We thought the story of the story said a lot about the government – and about trying to report on the government. So we debriefed him for this week’s podcast.

Semi-spoiler alert: Yes, NASA does spend millions on so-called “premium travel.” But there also is a deeper story about how the government as a whole does not know how much is spent on something as simple as premium travel, despite being ordered to keep track of it. And that raises the question: How does the government keep track of the really complicated stuff?

And now another reminder: The launch of our new, multi-media DecodeDC blog is only a few weeks off. Sit tight. And tune in.